Teleconferencing among groups of people has always been a troublesome task. Even arranging small teleconferences is time-consuming and requires a flurry of e-mail messages and telephone calls between individuals to agree on an appointed time, establish a conference host, and assign conference bridge numbers, access codes, etc.
The cost associated with teleconferencing can also be prohibitive, not only for conferences that use centralized third party bridges, but also for in-house meetings that use conferencing resources from a local system such as a PBX or Internet Protocol (IP) telephony system.
Conferences among very large groups of people such as a company-wide address by the organization's president can be so expensive or complex to set up that many organizations do not even bother with such meetings unless absolutely necessary.
Lastly, ad-hoc group communications across political, geographic and organizational borders at times of emergency where inter-agency, inter-state or even international co-operation is required takes time to put in place and may involve a great deal of “red tape” before people can actually communicate with each other. Often a technical solution is simply not available to facilitate the cross communication of users operating disparate communications devises such as computer, telephones and two-way radio systems.
There is, therefore, a need for a network-based solution to these challenges that provides a high-performance virtual peer-to-peer instant communications system that uses an existing computer data network to create massively scalable group communications channels having audio, video, and data content.
The general state of the art in this field is illustrated by the following published U.S. patents. U.S. Pat. No. 6,591,301 discloses a method and system for controlling network gatekeeper message processing. U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,535,486 and 6,130,880 disclose a method and apparatus for adaptive prioritization of multiple information types in highly congested communication devices. U.S. Pat. No. 5,327,428 discloses a method and system for collision-free insertion and removal of circuit-switched channels in a packet-switched transmission structure. However, these methods and systems do not address the issues of simultaneously communicating among a variety of disparate communication systems.